Saddam's WMD Have Been Found

Insight Magazine ^ | 26 April 2004 | Kenneth R. Timmerman

[Lando Lincoln]

New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-

looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice. Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:

• A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?
  
  
• "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
  
  
• New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
  
  
• A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."
  
  
• "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."
  
  
• "Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] - well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
  
  
• In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles - probably the No Dong - 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.
  
  In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."
  
  In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program" [see "Documents Prove U.N. Oil Corruption," April 27-May 10].
  
  What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."
  
  
  The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents - much of it added in the last year." That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account. Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.
  
  But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same.
  
  Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.
  
  In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found. Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.
  
  But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."
  
  The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides - or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.
  
  When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."
  
  Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.
  
  At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."
  
  That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"
  
  At Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia - U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."
  
  Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding. "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."
  
  The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like.
  
  A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation. "The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.
  
  What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.
  
  Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.
  
  "The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."
  
  For more on WMD, read "Iraqi Weapons in Syria"
  
  Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
  email the author

  
  

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[Turbo Pig]

Have you considered that we may not be announcing the finding of WMDs because we haven't found them ALL. At least some are likely to be in the hands of the "Insurgents." Not making the announcement deters the bad guys from using them against us and the Iraqi population in general. If we "find" WMDs, they can use them.

Sounds good on the surface. I can't agree with it, though. Simple reason being that the "insurgents" have no problems using women and children as human sheilds. They have no problem with blowing themselves up and killing innocent Iraqis. Finally, it was stated a long time ago, by the Al Queda crew, that they wanted to get WMDs. I think that if they had them, they would have used them by now.

[spaceman spiff]

I am not talking strictly Al Quada. The Iraqi "insurgents" just want us out of Iraq so they can take over. Using WMD would prove Saddam had them and that we are justified in staying. If they just wanted to kill innocents, chemical weapons are ideal.

[Turbo Pig]

I know you didn't mean soley Al Queda. I just think human sheilds and homicide bombings are the fashionalbe things to do amongst ALL the hip "insurgents" in Iraq this seaon.

[Milligan]

I quess Bush is a good poker player.

[Dr. Frank fan]

Turbo, I hear what you're saying. All the factors you cite are in play.

I think it's important to keep in mind though that not all "insurgents" are created equal. At risk of oversimplifying, we know about at least 3 main factions: Baathist Creep Heavies (BCHs), Shiite Hateful Theocrats (SHTs), and Foreign Al Qaeda Instigator-Ringleaders (FAQIRs). (There's probably also a good number of just run-of-the-mill street-running thugs/losers, who may migrate amongst the 3 and do some looting along the way etc, but they're not worth mention.)

What spiff's theory is suggesting, I think, is that, from the point of view of our military strategists, publicizing and officially declaring "WMD Found!", even if they *have been*, may backfire in that it removes a potential disincentive for certain of the "insurgents" who may (for all we know) have some of the war-dislocated "WMD", to use them. Since we can't (according to this theory) assume that this faction doesn't have them, we're going to keep the deterrent in place by holding the "WMD" question at Not Found status for now.

Two factors need to be present for this theory to hold water:

1. One or more of the "insurgent" factions must actually have some war-dislocated "WMD", or more to the point, there must be a good reason to suspect/fear that this is the case.

2. That faction or factions which (we believe) might *have* those "WMD", must *currently* believe that "because it would prove the US was right to invade, and grant more political legitimacy to the occupation, making it harder to force them out" is a sufficient disincentive not to use them. In other words, they must be deter-able, by this kind of geopolitical motive.

I do agree with you that that rules out "Al Qaeda". What you're saying, I think, is that *some* of the "insurgents" have so far displayed no compunction of any sort about killing anybody for any reason, and have shown no signs that such considerations as politics (which is what the "WMD" issue is now about) would deter them. That is correct, but it seems to be correctly mostly of the FAQIR faction, since (according to reports) they seem to be behind all the actual *terrorism*, i.e. killing Iraqis in a market trying for no real reason other than to foment "instability" and possibly to instigate a Sunni-Shiite civil war, according to the strategy laid out by Zarqawi in his memo.

But the faction that seems to be assembled around the BCHs and based in Fallujah - which is the faction you'd actually expect to have inherited some of the WMDs from Saddam's regime - has also committed what is technically terrorism, but (if I understand events correctly) it is usually against us Occupiers, and/or those who "collaborate" with us by e.g. lining up to apply for a job with the new Iraqi police force. It is less clear that this faction is just interested in killing innocents, fomenting "instability", etc. More likely that what they want is their Power back. And (it's not much of a leap to think) whatever leaders they have probably perceive reasonably accurately the political ramifications of the "WMD" question.

In other words: since they want the Americans out and their cushy lifestyle and Power back, they ARE subject to deterrence (according to this theory). Proving the US's "WMD" line and validating Bush/Cheney would go against what they are trying to accomplish, which is not primarily to kill lots of people, but to get power back.

Again, it's true that the FAQIRs are just there to (according to their typical brilliant strategizing) cause death, death, and more death till the Crusaders leave. But one (hopefully) wouldn't expect them, or their friends the SHTs, to have gotten their hands on the "WMD" in the first place (the foiled Jordan attack notwithstanding; of course, presumably those CWs were funneled to AQ from Syria).

One would expect Saddam's old "WMD", if there really were any, to have fallen into the hands of his trusted deputies and underlings upon his fall - and thus to be controlled by someone of the "BCH" faction. The Baathists want the Americans out every bit as much as the FAQIRs do, of course, but they certainly know that's not going to happen if Bush gets handed "Saddam had WMD after all!" on a silver platter. (Meanwhile the FAQIRs wouldn't care much, because they're just there to kill people until Iraq is integrated into the Caliphate one way or another....)

At any rate, it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for the American powers that be to *assume* all of this. (That 1. some of the "WMDs" fell into the hands of some "insurgent" faction and 2. that faction is currently deterred from using them for the political reason that they'd hate to prove the US was Right To Invade.) Which would be, therefore, a plausible motive for the Americans to intentionally disavow and back away from any and all definitive "WMD Found!" announcements.

Of course, as it stands it's still only a theory, I'm not here saying I think it's definitely true. But it *is* something I'd never considered before and I don't think it can be easily dismissed - and as of now it does seem to fit all the facts as we know them (or at least as *I* know them, from my shallow analysis and sporadic reading on the subject :). Obviously, the jury's still out and we may not really get these matters cleared up in any satisfactory way for many years, if ever. But I do welcome and appreciate little flashes of insight such as spiff's, which may make these issues at least a bit more understandable.

[Lady In Blue]

bump for later read.

[Milligan]

But they did not have enough translators to go through all the documents and then the scientist....

[Milligan]

I know I haven't cleaned out my frig for awhile and I have many moldy things, but how many people have strains of bottled botulism, brucella, congo-crimean hemorrhagie fever lurking in their frig? Starter kits for disaster? Just start off with a tablespoon.

[clyde260]

Mark for later

[RetiredArmy]

And Wolf said, and Peter said, and Dan Blather said, and Aaron said, and Diane Sawyer said, and Opra said, and Algore said, and JFK said, and and and and and, oh it is such a mess!

[PattonReincarnated]

It would be criminally negligent to let the 'where are the WMDs?' line go unanswered for a *year*.

The situation seems to be that WMDs are addressed all the time, but the media doesn't seem to care to make this a major story. I can think of a number of reasons why the Bush administration has not pushed the issue, however they have provided as much information as possible all along. So they are not criminally negligent in their disclosure. Apparently there is much more investigation require - perhaps ties to the oil-for-food program, a Syrian connection, etc. There are a lot of loose ends. Plus, and I hate to say this, we may not be equipped to handle the situation if the WMDs when to Syria or Iran. The latter I would consider potentially negligent if anything comes of the WMDs or we do not ultimately resolve the problem.

[TXFireman]

ping

[spaceman spiff]

Thank you for fleshing out my thoughts. That is exactly what I had in mind. Actually since my boy got back from there I have had a bit more info that what is publicly known. However, it is mostly from what he doesn't say or won't talk about.

The best data to date is that Bush won't say they have not been found, only that we may yet find them. He won't lie but he will certainly NOT risk soldiers or innocents to make a political point.

[narses]

War JUSTIFIED. Will the press report this?

[nopardons]

bttt

[Wolfstar]

I firmly believe that if the "Oil for Food" scandal is investigated to its complete conclusion, it will reveal that the UN weapons inspections were also compromised by payoffs.

I have no doubt about this whatsoever. The answer to what happened to the WMD is inextricably tied to the oil-for-food scam. At least one of three things happened (if not a combination):

• Hussein moved his WMD out of the country while Annan, Chirac, Putin and Shroeder helped him stall for time.
• Hussen had the WMD buried in backyards, remoted desert areas and/or equally remote mountainous regions while Annan, Chirac, Putin and Shroeder helped him stall for time.
• The weapons had actually been found and destroyed by the UN in the mid-1990's, but Hussein, Annan, Chirac, Putin, and corrupt UN weapons inspectors colluded to keep the fiction going that Iraq still had WMD. Reason: All corrupted parties found it lucrative to maintain the fiction because it kept the oil-for-food scam going.

If the latter is true — and I suspect it may be — it is by far the worst of the three scenarios. If true, they knowingly allowed the Iraqi people to suffer, starve, and be bombed almost daily in the no-fly zones — and they knowingly fed false intelligence to the U.S., Great Britain and others in order to keep up the oil-for-food rationale.

This third scenario fully explains the apparant desperation on the part of Annan, Chirac, and Putin to try to prevent our invasion, and it explains why Hussein seemed to entirely misread the resolve of Bush and Blair. It also explains how someone like Scott Ritter could vehemently insist that Iraq had WMD one day, then turn on a dime and insist they didn't — too late for anyone to believe him.

[narses]

bttta

[Wolfstar]

Nevertheless, it leaves me wondering: why the heck isn't the Bush admin out there making this point?

Good question. Of course, we can only speculate as to the answer. My take is that there already is an awful lot on the administration's plate. Right now, the UN is a useful tool for legitimizing the new Iraqi government and upcoming elections. I think the President is trying to focus on the sovereignty hand-over in Juse, and is trying to keep a lid on the whole mess until after our own election. If my speculation is accurate, I don't agree with this approach. Better to let the whole putrid mess blow sky high.

[Helms]

If the latter is true — and I suspect it may be — it is by far the worst of the three scenarios. If true, they knowingly allowed the Iraqi people to suffer, starve, and be bombed almost daily in the no-fly zones — and they knowingly fed false intelligence to the U.S., Great Britain and others in order to keep up the oil-for-food rationale. This third scenario fully explains the apparent desperation on the part of Annan, Chirac, and Putin to try to prevent our invasion, and it explains why Hussein seemed to entirely misread the resolve of Bush and Blair.

I believe there will be WMD's found as if that were the only rational to go to war with a totally rougue regime.

This is great stuff and explains Hans Blix and his book tour and mouthing off, but very similar to the Dick Clarke phenomenon.

[My2Cents]

WS, this is an excellent rundown of possibilities. Frankly, this is the most plausible explanation I've yet read about what happened to the WMDs and why. It makes perfect sense -- the UN dragging its feet, the almost insane resistence of France and Germany to our move toward war, Scott Ritter's hysteria, the "here-one-day/gone-the-next" nature of the WMDs themselves. It all fits your scenario.

It would be delicious to be able to finally conclude that Saddam's WMDs were a ploy in the Oil-for-Food scam, as it would humiliate the European apologists of Saddam (and probably bring down Schroeder's and Chirac's governments), and it could mean the end of the UN.